The future of Paris’s notorious gambling clubs, gifted to Corsicans for their
role in the Resistance, is under threat after police closed three in a
massive sting for suspected links with the mafia.

The three closures in the space of three weeks suggest thatFrenchpolice have finally decided to end decades of tolerance towards the controversial venues.

Paris’s circles de jeu (gambling clubs) long held a reputation as being controlled by Corsican gangsters based on the Mediterranean island or in Marseilles and being money-laundering dens.

Glamorised in countless detective novels, they were the subject of epic and bloody disputes between rival mafia clans, notably in the so-called “gambling wars” of the 1970s.

However, in recent years the surviving few were believed to have changed their ways.

Eight were still in operation last month. But on Wednesday, some 200 officers from Paris’s judicial police swooped on Le Cercle Wagram and L’Eldo in the city’s 17th and 3rd arrondissements after a year-long investigation into their owners’ allegedly fraudulent practices.

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The following day, a second swoop took place in Corsica, in which thirty suspects were arrested. These included two actors from a TV series called Mafiosa, the clan, shot on the island, and four retired police officers.

Some 800,000 euros (£710,000) in cash was also seized.

Just three weeks earlier, another club, Le Cercle Haussmann, in the 2nd arrondissement was raided and shut and seven people placed under investigation for illegal gambling practices.

After years of relative calm, police believe that the Corsican mafia took renewed interest in the clubs as money-laundering outfits when the venues’ profits started to soar thanks to a recent craze in France for poker, whose ambassadors include French film stars and singers.

Police said rival gangs have been fighting for control of the clubs after a spate of killings in Corsica and Marseilles that has left the long-feared “Brise de Mer” gang fatally weakened.

The first circles opened in Paris in 1907 after casinos were banned from operating within 62 miles of the French capital.

After the war, France let a number of Corsicans run the clubs for services rendered in the Resistance.

They still operate under a 1901 law that deems them “non-profit” organisations whose stated aims are to promote “social, artistic literary and sporting activities”.

Under these archaic rules, they are not required to adhere to strict security measures found in casinos, such as fitting video surveillance cameras over every gaming table — meaning there is no way of keeping tabs on the amounts cashed in.

Today such rules are totally obsolete and the reality is rather different, police said. “We cannot tolerate seeing practices linked to organised crime go on any longer in these places,” an investigator told Le Parisien.

Since 1947, licences can be given or removed by the interior ministry’s special racing and gaming service, SCCJ.

To improve their image, several clubs had started donating to cancer charities and one to a police health insurer.

But the rot started in 2007, when Paris’ famous Cercle Concorde was shut for its shady links to a Corsican mafia gangster based in Marseilles, who owned the restaurant next to the club.

Le Concorde, whose official aims were to “promote the French republican ideal” was closed down in 1987.

But it was reopened in the presence of dozens of celebrities and political figures, including Princess Caroline of Monaco, in 2006 after Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, gave the green light for its rebirth.

A year later, it was shut after investigators found it was being used as “the goose that lays the golden eggs to generate significant clandestine profits by misuse of the till”.

Among Paris’s five remaining circles is the Aviation Club de France, France’s oldest.

The mythical venue on the Champs-Elysées is run by the former head of France’s anti-gangster squad. Charles Pelligrini said that the clubs' “sulphurous reputation” was long well-deserved.